Editor's Note: Any reference to TheStreet Ratings and its underlying recommendation does not reflect the opinion of TheStreet, Inc. or any of its contributors including Jim Cramer or Stephanie Link.

Trade-Ideas LLC identified Apache Corporation ( APA) as a post-market leader candidate. In addition to specific proprietary factors, Trade-Ideas identified Apache Corporation as such a stock due to the following factors:

APA has an average dollar-volume (as measured by average daily share volume multiplied by share price) of $320.4 million.

Apache Corporation, an independent energy company, explores for, develops, and produces natural gas, crude oil, and natural gas liquids. The stock currently has a dividend yield of 1%. APA has a PE ratio of 17.5. Currently there are 13 analysts that rate Apache Corporation a buy, no analysts rate it a sell, and 10 rate it a hold.

The average volume for Apache Corporation has been 3.7 million shares per day over the past 30 days. Apache has a market cap of $32.1 billion and is part of the basic materials sector and energy industry. The stock has a beta of 1.92 and a short float of 2.9% with 3.00 days to cover. Shares are up 5.1% year to date as of the close of trading on Wednesday.

TheStreet Quant Ratings rates Apache Corporation as a buy. The company's strengths can be seen in multiple areas, such as its attractive valuation levels, expanding profit margins, good cash flow from operations and largely solid financial position with reasonable debt levels by most measures. We feel these strengths outweigh the fact that the company has had sub par growth in net income.

Highlights from the ratings report include:

The gross profit margin for APACHE CORP is rather high; currently it is at 69.68%. It has increased from the same quarter the previous year. Along with this, the net profit margin of 17.29% is above that of the industry average.

Net operating cash flow has increased to $2,621.00 million or 30.59% when compared to the same quarter last year. In addition, APACHE CORP has also vastly surpassed the industry average cash flow growth rate of -25.59%.

The current debt-to-equity ratio, 0.39, is low and is below the industry average, implying that there has been successful management of debt levels. Despite the fact that APA's debt-to-equity ratio is low, the quick ratio, which is currently 0.60, displays a potential problem in covering short-term cash needs.

Regardless of the drop in revenue, the company managed to outperform against the industry average of 10.7%. Since the same quarter one year prior, revenues slightly dropped by 7.0%. Weakness in the company's revenue seems to have hurt the bottom line, decreasing earnings per share.